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I was 16, and the thought of being forced to mention God as part of the pledge of allegiance was too hypocritical an act for me to play along with. Each day of high school began with this mundane recitation, as most people just stood with their hand jutting from a hip, the other dangling across their chest as they counted out the seconds until they could sit back down. They leaned against desks, and talked through it about what party and where it would be, if there would be a keg or a bonfire in the woods. I recited the words, omitting the "under God" part as a sort of half-baked protest. I was raised to flaunt my family's ramshackle atheism, as a choice of smug pride. We knew better, was the prevailing logic.

But one day, I could not stand and say any of it. It felt so rote, so hollow, so devoid of choice. There was no law that said I was required to say it. I knew this was my right, a form of free speech. My homeroom teacher was a legendary drinker, a trash-talking re…

the empty

The fat girl as they call her, came to school with a hypodermic needle in her backpack. It may have been to defend herself, it may have been to instigate something. She comes from a broken home and this is her second or third school. E steers clear of her, and the bullies she tangles with. It was never understood - how things began, who threw the first insult, the first punch, the first grabbed book but the end is a chronic cycle of violence. At one point, the girl's mother got the police involved and this was seen as offensive, a step too far. The police did not resolve anything so it was all just a lot of saber rattling. That is the most common sound here. The empty threat.

Last week, there was a sobrani, sort of a cross between a parent-teacher conference and a school meeting. I was busy, so E went by herself and took notes. Five minutes in she messaged me, that I was wise not to be there. Nothing about this girl was going to be resolved."Boys will be boys" was all that they said.

It was announced that some other, older boys were going to be expelled. They had taunted E recently, shouting that America was the land of homosexuals. But that is not why they were being expelled.

The meeting quickly turned to something the mothers really cared about. They hurled insults and fury at the teachers asking why their children had to go to art classes, why there was a tiny theater program folded into their music classes. And actually, why music classes too? They pissed and moaned about how their children fell asleep at nine o'clock, there was so much schoolwork, and how they (the mothers) had to do most of their homework for them as a result.

Back at home, E talked about all of this, how ridiculous it was for the school to accept homework done by a parent, which was only eclipsed by their habit of letting the children in her class take their final exams with notebooks on their laps, cheat-sheets upon cheat-sheets prepared by their parents. No oversight. No code of conduct, just a beeline for results no matter how or why they would be accomplished.

E sat and sighed. Of course she did her own homework, and asked for help if she was stuck We had even gone so far as to hire her a math tutor to help prepare her for the final exams. But she took them with nothing to help her, no notes tucked up her sleeve or scribbled on the white edge of her sneakers. She gets A's and B's, the hard way.

I did not have any magic answers for her. Nothing will inspire change. This is a country like so many others, built on a brutal foundation, where czars killed each other to take power, sons and fathers, mothers and uncles all at each others throats and it was simple seen as history unfolding.
This is still our world, all of it.
We are the barbarians and there are no gates.